Edanz Group, a Beijing-based company that provides English language editing and support services for the worldwide scientific community, has launched a free, online Journal Selector tool aimed at helping scientists and academic researchers find the most appropriate outlets for their articles. The tool is also available as a free widget that can be placed on the websites of interested research libraries.
“It’s not only authors from emerging markets that have difficulty choosing a journal, it is academics everywhere,” Benjamin Shaw, global and China director for Edanz Group, told LJ. “When you stop and think about the basket of criteria that an author would use to choose a journal, you see that it is a fairly complex issue.”
Researchers are generally familiar with the most prestigious journals in their field, but in the publish-or-perish world of academia, convenience, publication costs, and timeliness are also important factors. As Shaw pointed out, peer-reviewed journals have proliferated in recent decades. For example, there are now over 400 journals dedicated to the subject of neuroscience alone, he noted.
“With all of these options, authors are having to choose from sometimes hundreds of journals” when they have research ready for publication, Shaw added.
The selector tool works by comparing the author’s abstract, or short article description, with keywords from abstracts from a database of more than 18,000 journal titles. Results are ranked by relevance, or an author can choose to filter and refine the results by Thompson Reuters Impact Factor, by preference for Open Access, or by frequency of publication.
“The tool will help an author choose a journal in a more efficient, comprehensive way,” Shaw said.
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